LOST: Many novels, lots of paintings, quite a few films … and even a few cities…

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Heartbreaking cat or dog stories get to some, others get teary when they think about passed loved ones … oh, sure, a sad lost kitten tale will get to me and there are far too many people who are no longer in my life (and are sorely missed) but what gets the waterworks really flowing is thinking about the movies, books, places, paintings, and music that are just … gone.

It’s becoming harder and harder to fathom the idea of anything really being totally missing: this is, after all, the age of the Internet and we are all far-too familiar with the maxim “the web never forgets.” But even a cursory glance at history will bring tears to the eyes of even the most cold-hearted.

Oh, sure, there’s still a chance that some of these treasures – and the thousands of others – might someday reappear, but for now they’ve just disappeared, vanished … gone.

Even cutting down the sob-story list of the missing to just films and a few special books – because, let’s face it, the catalog of paintings and music that can’t be found is simply staggering – leaves a pretty depressing catalog of absent features and tomes.

A few are not just absent but also damned alluring. Sure, more than few of the missing films were very small budget affairs (like some of Andy Warhol and Kenneth Anger’s) but more than a few of them were pretty lavish affairs.

And one is just plain weird. Most of you know kaiju (Japanese big monster movies, for the nerd-impaired). True aficionados of the genre gloat in knowing not just the first kaiji is the legendary Gojira but that it was made in 1954.

Thursday, November 6, 2014

Check it out: a brand new column by yers truly just went up on the amazing (ahem) Amazing Stories site. Here's a tease:

“This is unquestionably the most stupendous, the most interesting, and the most important undertaking, ever accomplished or even attempted by man…”

The 1800’s — especially the middle to latter half — were a time when it seemed like everything either was happening or could happen any day: the photograph was coming into common use, the telegraph meant communication at the speed of light, anesthesia promised (for the first time) painless surgery, Babbage began work on his analytical engine, and the possibility of conquering the bounds of earth seemed just around the corner.

However, according to a series of articles published by The Sun in 1944, that aforesaid conquering wasn’t a matter of years but had actually been phenomenally achieved by one Mr. Monck Mason.

First appearing in April 13, 1844, a New York paper proclaimed – in LOUD and DRAMATIC type: ASTOUNDING NEWS! BY EXPRESS VIA NORFOLK: THE ATLANTIC CROSSED IN THREE DAYS!

That initial article went on to announce that the machine in question was a STEERING BALLOON named VICTORIA, and that the trans-Atlantic voyage took an amazing SEVENTY-FIVE HOURS FROM LAND TO LAND.

Okay, weird and wild claims were somewhat common back then – just take a look at the very fanciful “Great Moon Hoax” published only ten years before — but who could doubt the authenticity of such a detailed report? Each article was packed with immaculate details of how this incredible voyage was achieved.

Take for instance, that the trip began on Saturday, April the 6th, 1844, at 11:00AM from Penstruthal, in North Wales. The participants being “Sir Everard Bringhurst; Mr. Osborne, a nephew of Lord Bentinck’s; Mr. Monck Mason and Mr. Robert Holland, the well-known aeronauts; Mr. Harrison Ainsworth, author of ‘Jack Sheppard,’ etc; and Mr. Henson, the projector of the late unsuccessful flying machine — with two seamen from Woolwich — in all, eight persons.”

Sunglasses, wallets, phone chargers … stuff goes missing all the
time. But misplacing a set of car keys is one thing but it’s quite
another to lose a body of water … and even stranger when it comes back,
and yet doesn’t.

It’s not like vanishing lakes are rare – it actually happens more
often than you might expect. Sometimes their going bye-bye is just a
fact of life for their kind: feeding rivers or streams dry up, leading
to the same for the poor lake. In other situations the opposite is the
case: a river gets so frisky that it overwhelms and then completely
swallows one.

Then there are the bodies of water that disappear, sucked straight
down into the earth. Lake Beloye, in Russia, for example, back in 2005:
here one day, gone quite literally the next. The leading theory being
that the lake drained into a underground natural lake or cave system.

But what happened to Lake Peigneur, in Iberia Parish, Louisiana, is far from natural – but also incredibly, wonderfully, bizarre.

Is there any style or genre that M. Christian can’t (or won’t) write in?
After reading this very fine short story collection from one of today’s
most prolific professionals, I’m leaning heavily towards “no”. The ‘m’
in M. Christian seems to stand for “multi-faceted”, or possibly
“mega-multi-tasker”. The guy certainly is versatile, as well as daring,
imaginative, often funny, and seldom—if ever—unentertaining, one of
those writers who seems to be everywhere at once, though if he has, in
fact, cracked the saintly secret of bi-location, he’s not talking.

Readers
get a broad sense of Christian’s incredible range in “Love Without Gun
Control”, the author’s 2009 self-compiled and –published collection of
short fiction, most of which originally appeared in genre anthologies,
now-defunct niche-specific literary magazines and long-since cached or
dead-linked websites. These fourteen stories run a dizzying—and
impressive—gamut of mood and style, each with its own carefully measured
ratio of light to shadow, buoyancy to seriousness, horror to humor, and
hope to despair.

Christian has clearly learned from, and
distilled the essence of the best examples of twentieth-century American
fiction, everything from Ray Bradbury and Jack Kerouac to Cormac
McCarthy and Stephen King. He does not shy away from his influences, but
has wisely allowed them to sing through him as he delves the deep,
sometimes silly recesses of the American psyche. The title story is a
broad, campy social satire in addition to being a pitch-perfect sendup
of old Western movies and TV shows, while “Wanderlust” and “Orphans” pay
dark homage to the uniquely American mythos of “the road”—think
Steinbeck’s musings on Route 66 in “The Grapes of Wrath”, or the arid,
windswept, dread-haunted vistas of Stephen King’s “The Gunslinger” and
“The Stand”.

In “Needle Taste”, Christian shows that he is no
less adept at horror of the decidedly psychological variety.
Techno-thriller melds seamlessly with High Fantasy in “The Rich Man’s
Ghost”; political satire meets The Zombie Apocalypse in “Buried with the
Dead”, while knotty existential drama and the classic Post-Apocalyptic
narrative come together in “1,000”, and “Nothing So Dangerous”, a story
of love and betrayal in a time of revolution. Perhaps my favorite
stories in this collection are the beautiful, elegiac, Bradbury-esque
“Some Assembly Required,” a narrative at once clever and poignant, and
the brilliantly breezy “Constantine in Love”:

“It was called The
Love Shack, and it sold all kinds of obvious things: candy, flowers,
poetry books, jewelry, balloons, perfume, lingerie, and many other
sweet, frilly, and heart-shaped items. It stood alone, bracketed by two
vacant lots. Its busiest days were just before Valentine’s and
Christmas. It was described by many newspapers and tourist guides as “. .
. the place to go when love is on your mind.”

The night was dark, the place was closed. The streets were quiet.

Then
the Love Shack exploded—with a fantastic shower of fragmented
chotchkes, and flaming brick-a-brack, it went from a shop dedicated to
amore to a skyrocket of saccharine merchandise. Flaming unmentionables
drifted down to land in smoking heaps in the middle of the street, lava
flows of melted and burning chocolate crawled out for the front door,
teddy bears burned like napalm victims, and cubic zirconia mixed with
cheap window glass—both showering down the empty, smoldering hole that
used to be the store . . .”

I do have a few complaints as well.
In several of these stories, I found myself wishing for a stronger
editorial hand. The text needs a good, personally-detached copyedit.
Several otherwise excellent stories (“Hush, Hush”; “1,000”; “Friday”)
are simply too long to effectively maintain the emotional impact for
which the author aims. I found them overly repetitive and rather dull,
with the narrative lines collapsing into nebulous incoherency. After
all, the “short” in short fiction should be a clue to the essence of the
form; all unnecessary baggage and ballast summarily jettisoned to
achieve an economy of language, and, with it, maximum expression.
Christian is an established and well-respected editor in his own right,
but no matter how skillful or perceptive an author may be as an editor
of other people’s work, when it comes to self-editing, even the best and
brightest have their blind spots.

Still, there’s far more to
like and admire in this collection than to kvetch about or pan. Readers
will be well-rewarded for what is, in the end, a ridiculously modest
price of admission.

But if you happened to
be living in Cameroon you'd know all too well that lakes can, and do, explode.

Take for example the
Lake Nyos in the Northwest Province of Cameroon. Part of the inactive Oku
volcano chain, it's an extremely deep, extremely high and, most importantly,
very calm, very still, lake.

But it hasn't always
been so calm or still. In 1986 something very weird happened to Lake Nyos, a
weirdness that unfortunately killed 3,500 head of livestock ... and 1,700
people.

No jokes this time. No
clumsy 50's horror movie metaphors. What happened to the people in the three
villages near that lake isn't funny. Most of them luckily died in the sleep,
but the 4,000 others who escaped the region suffered from sores, repertory
problems and even paralysis.

All because Lake Nyos exploded.

Before the why, here's
some more: what happened to the villages of Cha, Nyos, and Subum that time
isn't unique. The same thing happened to lake Monoun, also in Cameroon, in
1984. That time 37 people died, again not very pleasantly. What does sound like
a scene from some only horror flick is the story of a truck that had been
driving near the scene. Mysteriously, the truck's engine died, and then so did
the ten people who got out: suffocating within minutes of stepping down. Only
two people of the dozen survived, all because they happened to be sitting on
top of the truck.

The technical term for
what happened to Lake Nyos and Monoun is a limnic eruption. To get one you need
a few basic elements: one, a very deep volcanic lake; two, said lake has to be
over a slow source of volcanic gas; and three, it has to be very, very still.

What happens is that
volcanic gas, mostly carbon dioxide but nasty carbon monoxide as well, super
saturates the lake. A clumsy way of thinking about it is a can of soda: shake
it up like crazy and the fluid in the can, held back by pressure, doesn't do
anything.

But pull the top, or in
the case of Nyos and Monoun, a small landslide or low magnitude earthquake, and
all that trapped gas rushes out in an immense explosion. That's bad enough, as
there are even some theories suggesting that the subsequent lake-tsunami from
the gassy blast has wiped out still more villages, but what's worse is that
those gasses trapped in the lake water are absolutely deadly.

Heavier than air, the
carbon dioxide flows down from the mountain lake, suffocating anything and
anyone in it's path – which explains how those two lucky passengers managed to
escape: they were simply above the toxic cloud.

Fortunately scientists
and engineers are working on ways to stop limnic blasts. Controlled taping of
the gasses, bubbling pipes to keep the water from becoming super saturated,
it's beginning to look like they might be able to keep what happened to the
1700 people of Nyos from happening again.

But what keeps other
scientists awake at night is that there are more than likely lots of other
lakes ready to explode, the question being ... when?

Okay, so lakes can
explode. But fruit doesn't drop to the sky and feline African predators aren't
born with fluffy down, and frogs don't pop ... right?

Not if you happened to
live in Germany a few years ago: for awhile there toads were doing just that.
And we're not talking a few here and there. Over 1,000 frogs were found burst
and blasted in a lake that was soon stuck with the pleasant name "the
death pool."

Theories flew like parts
of an exploding frog: a virus? A crazy who had a thing for dynamite and toads?
A detonating mass suicide? What the hell (bang) was going (boom) on (kablam)?

The cops checked out the
area and the local nut-houses but there wasn't anyone with that very weird and
very specific MO. Scientists check out the exploded remains but found no
suspicious viruses, parasites, or bacteria.

They one veterinarian
came up with the most likely answer: crows.

As anyone who has ever
watched a crow knows they do not fit the label bird brain. Extremely clever and
resourceful, crows are not only fast learners but they study, and learn from,
other crows. What Frank Mutschmann, one clever vet, hypothesized was that it
was happening was the meeting of smart crows and a frog's natural defenses –
plus the allure of livers.

Wanting that tasty part
of the toads, the crows had learned how to neatly extract it from their prey
with a quick stab of their very sharp bills. In response, the toads did what
they always go: puff themselves up. The problem – for the amphibians that is –
is that because they now had a hole where their livers were that defense then
became an explosive problem. Weasels might not literally go pop in that old
kid's song but that seems to be just what was happening to that lake of German
toads in 2005.

But that still doesn't
change that Pipins don't fall up, and lions don't have tails like a peacock's,
right? And what about ants? They don't explode, do they?

But they do. Ladies and
Gentlemen allow me to present camponotus saundersi. Native to Malaysia, this
average looking ant has a unique structure giving it an even more unique
behavior when threatened.

Running the length of
its little body are two mandibular glands full of toxins. That's bad enough, as
any critter that decides to try a bite will get a mouthful of foul-tasting,
maybe even deadly, venom, but what sets this ant aside from others is what
happens when it gets pushed into a corner.

By clamping down on a
special set of muscles these ants can commit violent and, yes, explosive
suicide: taking out any nearby threat with a hail of nasty poisons. It's
certainly a dramatic way to go but you can bet anything threatening it's colony
will get a shock it won't soon forget.

Sure apples do not fall
up and lions don't have feathers – but what with exploding lakes, bursting
toads, and suicide-bombing ants it you might want to check that your
grandmother's homemade pie doesn't float away or that lions aren't about to
swoop down from the sky and carry you off.

Monday, June 16, 2014

So far you lucky readers -- if that’s really what you are -- have
been treated to lost nuclear hardware, misplaced biological weapons,
an18th century spiritualist and his clockwork ‘God,’ and recently,
creatures great and small (mostly small) that can kill you faster than
you can read this sentence -- even if you’re a slow reader.

But
there’s an even more terrifying, creepy, freaky, disturbing subject we
haven’t talked about yet: one that can make even the heartiest,
stone-stomached of you clutch your tail-wagging doggies and purring
kitties while rocking back and forth mumbling “nature is good, nature is
good, nature is good …”

As you’ll soon read, however,
even your loving pets can save you from the nightmare that is, more
than likely, with you already.

Or, to be precise, living inside you already: parasites.

YouTube
has far too many clips of botflies, tapeworms, or pinworms in all their
disgusting glory: squirming and writhing from puss-glistening holes in
their victims, squirming in the bellies of those unfortunate enough to
have become part of their life cycle. But that’s not the worst.

We
like to think we’re the masters of our destiny, that “I think I shall
do (fill in the blank)” comes only from our minds and wills. But in
some cases that’s just not true -- or, perhaps, that’s what the
creature living inside me is telling me to say.

Welcome to the wonderful world of not just parasites, but parasites that directly influence or flat-out control their hosts.

Beginning
big or at least not microscopic, the emerald cockroach wasp has a very
unique, and rather frightening, method of supplying its pupal young with
a meal. Like some other insects, the wasp feeds its young living prey:
paralyzing the snack and then laying an egg on its still-living body.
But the emerald isn’t a very big bug, unlike the monstrous tarantula
wasp, so it can’t drag its prey back to its burrow. Instead, the
emerald performs a type of on-the-go brain surgery, carefully stinging a
roach in a few selected parts of its brain, disabling its escape
reflex. The wasp then chews off the roach’s antenna, effectively
blinding it. Hijacking the roach’s remaining stub of an antenna, it
then leads the still-living and -- if roaches have a form of
consciousness -- aware bug back to its burrow where it will be a
still-living dinner for its offspring.

Yes, you may shudder. But it gets worse.

You’re
just lucky you’re not a snail, especially one that happens to become
part of a leucochloridium paradoxum ’s elaborate lifecycle. Beginning
as eggs in bird droppings, leucochloridium enters the snail’s body and
then proceeds into its digestive tract. After a bit of time there, it
develops into a larva – and then things get interesting.

How,
you might ask, does leucochloridium go from snails to birds? Well, we
know how -- but you might not want to know the answer.

What
leucochloridium does is make its way from the snail’s gut to one of its
eyestalks. There it causes the stalk to become red and inflamed. But
that’s not all. The parasite also distorts the snail’s light perception
so that it doesn’t hide from light anymore. So, out in the broad
daylight, one eyestalk brightly colored, it becomes a something very
much like a grub or caterpillar -- which birds love to eat. So the
whole cycle begins again.

Then there’s sacculina, a
type of barnacle. It loves crabs, but not in a healthy kind of way.
What sacculina does, while in the barnacle’s larval phase, is find a
nice, juicy crab and land on it. Then it walks around the unlucky
crustacean until it finds an unarmored joint, and injects itself into
the crab’s tasty meat. But sacculina doesn’t eat the crab. Oh, no –
it’s not as simple as that. After a time in the crab’s body, the
barnacle reproduces and reproduces and reproduces some more until it
emerges as something a lot like a female’s egg sac.

That’s
important, because it’s not just the female crab this happens to. If
you should happen to be a male crab then transvestitism is in your
future. Sacculina messes with the hormones in the male crab, making it
basically a female -- especially appealing to other male crabs. It even
goes as far as adjust the male’s behavior so it actually begins to act
like a female crab, all to attract a male crab that may or may not have
other sacculina parasites to fertilize and keep the cycle going. Once
sacculina has you, if you’re a crab that is, then you belong to it.
Sterilized, you become nothing but a mother to its eggs. Until you die.

We’re
not finished yet -- far from it. Just be lucky you’re not a
grasshopper or a cricket. Spinochordodes tellinii (the hairworm) larva
finds its way into an unlucky hoppity by being eaten. Once in the bug
it grows -- but don’t think the worm just gets bigger. It gets so big
that when the adult worm comes out of the cricket it can be four times
longer than the bug. It’s how it comes out that’s going to give you the
shivers. When it simply has had enough of the bug, having pretty much
eaten all of it from the inside, the worm takes possession of the
insect’s brain, causing it to single-mindedly hunt out water. When it
does, the bug jumps in -- and that’s when the worm erupts out of the
host and swims away.

Okay, so it’s not fun to be a
snail, or a crab, or a cricket. But what about poor homo sapiens?
Please don’t tell me you think we don’t have our own, completely
unwelcome passengers. I’ve already mentioned botflies, pinworms and
tapeworms. But they are just freeloaders. They aren’t driving the bus
that is us like these other manipulative parasites do.

Hold
that puppy close, cuddle that kitten -- but maybe not that close. Ever
heard of toxoplasma gondii? No? Well you might have but it’s
certainly heard of you. In fact I’ll bet dollars to donuts that it’s
paying a lot of attention to these words right now. Feel like doing
something else? Anything else but reading this?

Maybe that isn’t you. Maybe it’s toxoplasma gondii.

I
love kitties. But after reading about toxoplasma gondii I think I’m
going to become a dog person. Primarily a cat parasite, gondii’s a
protozoa that enters the feline system when the animal eats an infected
animal. Once in the system, the protozoa can then reproduce asexually,
making life pretty damned easy for itself.

But not for
its hosts. Although the protozoa is mostly a cat fancier, it also can
infect rats and mice. When it does, it does something rather creepy: it
directly screws with the infected animal’s brain, taking out Mickey’s
fear of cats. Think about that for a second: not open spaces, not
water, not something big and general. Gondii only takes out a mouse’s
fear of cats -- making sure it’ll get eaten by one, its host of
preference.

Like I said, I really like kitties. But is
that really ‘me’ who likes cats? Rats and mice and other warm-blooded
creatures can carry gondii. You and I and every other homo sapien are
also warm-blooded. I think you see where this is going.

Here’s
a number for you: 25%. That’s a rather benign amount until you think
of 25% of humans. Especially when I add that it’s been theorized that
25% of human beings may be infected by gondii – a parasite that affects
the behavior of its hosts.

Some researchers have
suggested that men who have gondii in their systems have lower IQs, are
more prone to ‘novelty seek,’ and more masculine. Weirdly, infected
women come out with higher IQs.

Then there’s
reproduction. Not only do some think gondii changes what we are
personality-wise, but its also been suggested that women who are
infected have a tendency to give birth to more sons -- and males are
more likely to spread the infection.

We’ve lost nuclear
weapons, contaminated whole islands with biological devices, created
mechanical Gods, and have been killed by very small critters with very
nasty venoms. But when you think about parasites, especially certain
kinds of parasites, the question then becomes:

Thursday, April 24, 2014

Fans
of the old, but still wonderful, Road Runner cartoons might remember
Wile E. Coyote's favorite one-stop-shop for mayhem: The Acme Company. A
clever person – not one of us, alas – once said that Acme's slogan
should be "We Add Rockets To Everything."

This,
in a kind of round-about way, gets us to the 1950s and the
near-obsession that certain engineers had back then with a certain power
source. To put it another way, their slogan should have been: "We Add
Nuclear Power To Everything."

In
all fairness, reactors have proven – for the most part – to be pretty
reliable. Submarines, commercial power plants, and even monstrous
icebreakers have proven that nuclear power can be handy if not
essential. But back just a few decades ago there were plans, and even a
few terrifying prototypes, that would have made the Coyote green with
envy – and the rest of us shudder in terror.

Both
the US and the Soviet Union had engineers with lofty plans to keep
bombers in the air indefinitely by using nuclear power. Most folks, with
even a very basic knowledge of how reactors work, would think that was a
bit (ahem) risky, but what's even scarier is how far along some of
those plans got.

Take,
for example, the various projects the US undertook. In one case,
arguably the most advanced, they made plans to power a Convair B-36
bomber with a reactor. Scary? Sure, but what's even more so is that they
actually flew the plane, with an operational reactor, a total of 47
times.

While
that the reactor never actually powered the plane itself, and that
there were huge problems to overcome, didn't stop the engineers from
drawing up plans for a whole plethora of atomic planes.

But
what was perhaps even crazier than just powered a plane with a nuclear
reactor was the idea to use that power source as a weapon. Here, for
example, is a beautiful representation of the Douglas 1186 system, which
was supposed to use a parasite fighter to guide the warhead to the
target – and keep the poor pilot from engine's radiation.

But
the craziest of the crazy was the "Flying Crowbar." Not only was the
Supersonic Low Altitude Missile (to be formal), aka SLAM (to be short),
supposed to be a nuclear bomb deployment system but was also to use a
nuclear ramjet drive as a weapon: roasting the ground under it to a
Geiger-clicking nightmare while leaving a mushroom-cloud parade of bombs
behind it. Shuddering, by the way, would be a perfectly appropriate
response. Luckily, the Crowbar never got off the drawing board.

Leaving
the air to the birds, other engineers had different nuclear dreams: In
1958 the Ford Motor Car Company, not satisfied with the success of the
Edsel, put forth the idea of bringing radiation into the American home
... or, at least, the garage, with the Nucleon: a family car with an
on-board reactor.

While
some engineers played with the highways, a few looked to the rails.
Though neither the United States of the Soviet Union got very far with
powering a locomotive with a reactor, the USSR at least looked far
enough ahead to draw up some plans.

The Soviets, in a literally sky-high dream, even envisioned a new approach to flying their reactors: use a Zeppelin!

Still
other inventive types, determined to find a new use for the atom,
scratched their heads and came up with quite a few interesting, if not
dubious, ways of playing with nukes – but this time of the explosive
variety. Plowshare is one of the most commonly quoted of those
operations intended to put a smiley face in a mushroom cloud. A few of
their suggested uses include what they called the Pan- Atomic Canal: in
other words, using atomic bombs to widen the Panama Canal. They also
suggested using nukes for mining operations, though never really solved
the problem of dealing with then-radioactive ore.

It's
ironic that – what with the need to urgently replace our finite and
global-warming fossil fuels – that many are suggesting a new look at the
power of the atom. We can only hope that we, today, can be as
imaginative about it as they used to be back in the 1950s ... and a lot
more responsible.

But if you happened to
be living in Cameroon you'd know all too well that lakes can, and do, explode.

Take for example the
Lake Nyos in the Northwest Province of Cameroon. Part of the inactive Oku
volcano chain, it's an extremely deep, extremely high and, most importantly,
very calm, very still, lake.

But it hasn't always
been so calm or still. In 1986 something very weird happened to Lake Nyos, a
weirdness that unfortunately killed 3,500 head of livestock ... and 1,700
people.

No jokes this time. No
clumsy 50's horror movie metaphors. What happened to the people in the three
villages near that lake isn't funny. Most of them luckily died in the sleep,
but the 4,000 others who escaped the region suffered from sores, repertory
problems and even paralysis.

All because Lake Nyos exploded.

Before the why, here's
some more: what happened to the villages of Cha, Nyos, and Subum that time
isn't unique. The same thing happened to lake Monoun, also in Cameroon, in
1984. That time 37 people died, again not very pleasantly. What does sound like
a scene from some only horror flick is the story of a truck that had been
driving near the scene. Mysteriously, the truck's engine died, and then so did
the ten people who got out: suffocating within minutes of stepping down. Only
two people of the dozen survived, all because they happened to be sitting on
top of the truck.

The technical term for
what happened to Lake Nyos and Monoun is a limnic eruption. To get one you need
a few basic elements: one, a very deep volcanic lake; two, said lake has to be
over a slow source of volcanic gas; and three, it has to be very, very still.

What happens is that
volcanic gas, mostly carbon dioxide but nasty carbon monoxide as well, super
saturates the lake. A clumsy way of thinking about it is a can of soda: shake
it up like crazy and the fluid in the can, held back by pressure, doesn't do
anything.

But pull the top, or in
the case of Nyos and Monoun, a small landslide or low magnitude earthquake, and
all that trapped gas rushes out in an immense explosion. That's bad enough, as
there are even some theories suggesting that the subsequent lake-tsunami from
the gassy blast has wiped out still more villages, but what's worse is that
those gasses trapped in the lake water are absolutely deadly.

Heavier than air, the
carbon dioxide flows down from the mountain lake, suffocating anything and
anyone in it's path – which explains how those two lucky passengers managed to
escape: they were simply above the toxic cloud.

Fortunately scientists
and engineers are working on ways to stop limnic blasts. Controlled taping of
the gasses, bubbling pipes to keep the water from becoming super saturated,
it's beginning to look like they might be able to keep what happened to the
1700 people of Nyos from happening again.

But what keeps other
scientists awake at night is that there are more than likely lots of other
lakes ready to explode, the question being ... when?

Okay, so lakes can
explode. But fruit doesn't drop to the sky and feline African predators aren't
born with fluffy down, and frogs don't pop ... right?

Not if you happened to
live in Germany a few years ago: for awhile there toads were doing just that.
And we're not talking a few here and there. Over 1,000 frogs were found burst
and blasted in a lake that was soon stuck with the pleasant name "the
death pool."

Theories flew like parts
of an exploding frog: a virus? A crazy who had a thing for dynamite and toads?
A detonating mass suicide? What the hell (bang) was going (boom) on (kablam)?

The cops checked out the
area and the local nut-houses but there wasn't anyone with that very weird and
very specific MO. Scientists check out the exploded remains but found no
suspicious viruses, parasites, or bacteria.

They one veterinarian
came up with the most likely answer: crows.

As anyone who has ever
watched a crow knows they do not fit the label bird brain. Extremely clever and
resourceful, crows are not only fast learners but they study, and learn from,
other crows. What Frank Mutschmann, one clever vet, hypothesized was that it
was happening was the meeting of smart crows and a frog's natural defenses –
plus the allure of livers.

Wanting that tasty part
of the toads, the crows had learned how to neatly extract it from their prey
with a quick stab of their very sharp bills. In response, the toads did what
they always go: puff themselves up. The problem – for the amphibians that is –
is that because they now had a hole where their livers were that defense then
became an explosive problem. Weasels might not literally go pop in that old
kid's song but that seems to be just what was happening to that lake of German
toads in 2005.

But that still doesn't
change that Pipins don't fall up, and lions don't have tails like a peacock's,
right? And what about ants? They don't explode, do they?

But they do. Ladies and
Gentlemen allow me to present camponotus saundersi. Native to Malaysia, this
average looking ant has a unique structure giving it an even more unique
behavior when threatened.

Running the length of
its little body are two mandibular glands full of toxins. That's bad enough, as
any critter that decides to try a bite will get a mouthful of foul-tasting,
maybe even deadly, venom, but what sets this ant aside from others is what
happens when it gets pushed into a corner.

By clamping down on a
special set of muscles these ants can commit violent and, yes, explosive
suicide: taking out any nearby threat with a hail of nasty poisons. It's
certainly a dramatic way to go but you can bet anything threatening it's colony
will get a shock it won't soon forget.

Sure apples do not fall
up and lions don't have feathers – but what with exploding lakes, bursting
toads, and suicide-bombing ants it you might want to check that your
grandmother's homemade pie doesn't float away or that lions aren't about to
swoop down from the sky and carry you off.

Sunday, March 30, 2014

If
you're going to dream, the old saying goes, then you might as well
dream big. But Friedrich Wilhelm I did more than dream because, as
another expression says all too well: It's good to be the King.Friedrich,
born in 1688, was just one in a series of notable Prussian leaders.
Friedrich, though, unlike his father, Frederick I – who achieved much
during his reign, including wearing the crown for the first time, or
Friedrich's son – Frederick II, who was a reformer and fervent supporter
of reason and the arts – Friedrich, to put it mildly, loved a man in
uniform ... in a secularly big way.Friedrich,
you see, had this thing about the military. Oh, sure, he did, during
his reign, improve his then-tiny country's defenses, and carefully –
almost pathologically – controlled Prussia's economy to the point when
he finally passed away he left behind an awesome surplus. But
Friedrich's military obsession wasn't really about keeping his people
safe, or even about acquiring new territories: Friedrich liked – really
liked – a grand spit and polish display.How
big? How grand? Well, Friedrich's all-consuming passion was for his
grenadiers, a Regiment hand-picked not for their skill in battle, their
heroic abilities, but for being tall.In
a time when the average height was probably around five foot something,
the grenadiers – which quickly became known by the Prussians as the Lange Kerls (Big Guys) – began at six feet and went up up from there.The
Big Guys – and some of them were very big, coming in around seven feet –
were the king's all-consuming passion, to the point where it became
common for foreign dignitaries to use 'gifts' of very tall men to curry
favor with Friedrich. But even these presents, many of them with little
say in the matter, weren't enough to satisfy Friedrich's obsession: his
agents, promised huge rewards, were dispatched to the far corners of
Europe to get, by any means necessary, the tallest people they could
find.

To
say these agents were zealous would be an understatement: there are
tales of them kidnapping farmers from their fields, innkeepers from
their taverns, an Irish priest in the middle of a sermon, and they even
had the audacity to try to grab a Austrian diplomat. There's even the
story of one poor soul who was snatched off the streets of some foreign
city and shipped back to Prussia, but who arrived stiff and cold because
the agents forgot to punch air-holes in the crate.Friedrich
was so determined to fill the ranks of his grenadiers he even began his
own program of selective breeding, offering tall women and men rewards
to produce even taller children – and heaven help you if you knew
someone nice and tall and didn't tell the king about it.Oh,
how the king loved his grenadiers: he would lovingly paint their
portraits from memory, or order them to march for hours and hours around
his palace courtyard just so he relish in their military tallness, and,
if the king was feeling under the weather, he would even have them
thunderously circle his bed until he got better. As he told the French
ambassador: "The most beautiful girl or woman in the world would be a
matter of indifference to me, but tall soldiers – they are my weakness."Yes,
it was very good to be the king – but, alas, it was not so grand to be
one of his grenadiers. Even though Friedrich doted over them, many of
his giants were in agony from diseases related to their gigantism, were
painfully depressed after finding themselves in a unfamiliar land and
unable to speak a word of German, or who – again as a tragic effect of
their great height – were mentally the age of a young child. Desertions
were common, but since the giants were, well, 'gigantic' they were
quickly caught and subsequently, and brutally, punished. Some, sadly,
made the ultimate escape – but even suicides didn't dissuade the king
from begging, borrowing, or out-and- out stealing tall men for his
grenadiers. At its (excuse me) 'height' the flamboyant regiment numbered
over 3,000 men.Not surprising, considering how incredibly infatuated Friedrich was with them, the grenadiers were never sent into battle.

Eventually,
though, the king died, and with his death the kingdom, and Friedrich's
beloved Potsdam Grenadiers, were passed down to his son, Frederick II.
But while his father adored brass fittings, a good uniform, and
everything else stern and military, the son – having been raised by a
stern and military father – absolutely did not. Ironically, though,
Frederick II did attack neighboring Austria, putting into practice some
of his father's teachings. He also, after a time, put into actual combat
what few of Friedrich's grenadiers remained.There
was one problem, though. Because they were considerably taller – very
considerably taller – than their fellow soldiers, these surviving
grenadiers didn't survive very long: they simply too big to miss.Absolutely,
if you're going to dream you should dream big. But if you're lucky –
and you're a king – you don't have to settle for only dreams: you too,
like Friedrich, can have your own marching, thundering fantasy brought
to remarkably, and legendarily, tall life.

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

She hadn't thought about Mark in years – then, suddenly, she did. It wasn't something obvious, like seeing his face on someone else's who also had pale blond hair, like burnished steel, or eyes like amber marbles, but something swift and intangible, like a floating piece of consciousness you remember as not being fact, reality, but part of a dream half-forgotten.

Lisa had been standing in the warm sunshine down on Solano Avenue, walking back with her sister from seeing a movie – something with explosions and lots of male sweat, details already mostly forgotten. They'd parked far away, and chatted emptily as they marched back to Lisa's battered little sports car.

He'd had a tension about him sometimes, an almost tangible armor that would slip over him. The first time it had happened they'd fought later in the day, Lisa convinced on some level that she'd been the cause. It had happened, so quickly and without apparent cause and had lingered for hours, and he hadn't spoken a word about it. When the same had happened to Lisa, in other relationships, it usually meant anger at her, a stewing resentment just needing an impetus to release. Better, she'd learned, to get it out when she wanted to – beat the fight to the punch.

Hot, hard sunlight in her eyes and she replied mechanically to Shirley's polite sisterly banter. Why now – why think of that and Mark... now? The laughter of children in front of a nearby toy store, an old woman glacially making her way down the sidewalk in a mechanical walker, a burnished Latino man clipping branches from a tree in front of a doctor's office.

“Some people just shouldn't have children,” Shirley said, slipping into the passenger seat as Lisa absently hunted for the ignition. Lisa looked up, hunting for the source, and saw the three with the kids: two glowing parents, and a friend. The parents were young and sleek with their own kind of baby fat – the softness that Lisa had seen around her other friends that had the innocence and responsibility of children thrust onto them. “Luckily,” Shirley said, her eyes obscured by sunglasses, “other people can.”

Their friend wasn't sleek, wasn't soft. His hair was slightly greasy, his jeans rough and faded to threads in some places – and even though he was smiling with his friends and the children he had to accompany, his tension was obvious.

Lisa knew, that fragment finding it's place in her mind: the why of thinking of Mark. Yeah, some people shouldn't have children, but other people – good, kind people – were terrified of them.

****

It was night by the time she got back to her apartment, parking as usual in the darkness of the alley behind her building. After an afternoon with Shirley, Mark had faded into a cool melancholy – a lazy sadness about many things, old and nearly forgotten boyfriends only some of it.

At first she thought it was an insect, and fear/disgust/revulsion tingled up and down her spine. Then she thought it might be a toy – children being up way to late. Then she picked it up. Looking at it under the washed-out distant lights from the street beyond, she again thought specifically of one old boyfriend and brought it inside.

His breath had been hot – she remembered when it seemed about to scald her neck, how she'd felt she'd had to move – just a little – from under him, feeling it almost ready to burn her skin. He always seemed to have a bruise or two, looking like a swatch of grease on his angular body, from where he'd hurt himself at work.

The apartment seemed empty, cold – so she turned on the coffee machine and absently flicked on the set to keep her company. Her answering machine was beeping one, one, one in dark red – so she didn't play it, knowing it to be Shirley saying she'd be late for the movie.

The little machine wasn't a toy – it had a kind of patched-together, crude look to it. Putting it down on her kitchen counter it immediately started a hesitant exploration of its new environment. Smiling despite herself, she lunged to catch it as it neared an edge – only to have it pull away at the last minute. It had a couple of small motors, maybe scavenged from a toy after all. It had wire feelers, and a mysterious cluster of dark glass panels along its back. Its body seemed to be a piece of an old circuit board, the green material almost black in some places from being outside for a long time. It seemed to have eyes, as well, two discs facing forward. Yes, eyes, as she watched it hunted along her counter-top for light. It had a battery, a black box along its back, but must have fed, recharged, on what it could see – eating light through the flat glass panels on its back.

Also on its back was a cigar tube. Picking it up, Lisa shook it, hearing something inside. Carefully, she unscrewed it – and a tightly rolled sheet of paper came out.

****

Mark was very much in her mind. The gruff rumble of his voice, the deep avalanche of his laughter. For someone who saw tools as an extension of his self, he liked surprisingly subtle and sophisticated things. When he was crouched over some new machine, or under some behemoth of gears and engines, Bach chimed from his speakers. When he stopped to eat it was usually Sushi or Thai, and while he enjoyed watching things explode and men sweat on the screen he also had a complete Win Wenders collection and worshipped Jacques Tati.

The instructions on the paper were simple, straightforward. Even for someone like Lisa for whom Mark's terminology had been like listening to an ancient Asiatic language, she could understand it. It was also obviously a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy – the pattern of the diagrams in some places blurred by replication.

She stayed up for a long time, staring at the instructions and thinking about Mark, while the little machine patiently explored its new world – charging its battery from her kitchen lights.

****

The parts were surprisingly easy to find. Two trips to two different electronic stores. Cheap too – or would have been had she had some of the tools it required at hand.

Practicing with the soldering iron, she thought a lot about Mark. She built him, assembled him from memory as he sent curls of acid smoke up towards the ceiling: tall, thin – rough but not course, with a kind of mechanic's masculinity. Machines had been a special language for him, the key to a secret world of cause and effect. She remembered how his amber eyes glowed when he talked about some new project, some new device or construction – explaining to her innocence the philosophy of its gears, the beauty of its mechanisms.

She didn't have any photographs. No letters. They hadn't been together long – two and a half, maybe three years. She couldn't even remember why they'd broken up... exactly. She knew a lot of it was because of his passion, and her revelation that, at best, she'd only be the second most important thing in his life.

She burned herself, gesturing clumsily with the iron like it was a pencil or pen and not a very hot tool. The pain was like a flash in her eyes and she dropped it – luckily on the table and not on the carpet. After sucking on the inside of her finger when the iron had touched and almost crying, she breathed deep a few times and went back to trying to get enough with the unfamiliar tool.

That fight was very present in her mind. They had gone to a picnic with her sister, who'd been baby-sitting her friend's six-year-old. Mark hadn't made any noises when she'd told him about it, but that tension descended on him hard and fast whenever he was near the kid. Sally was a sweet girl, shy but very smart and with laughter that sounded like chiming bells. Still, Mark had been terrified.

Lisa hadn't known that – and so the fight: beat him to it, get it out in the open. For a long time he just stood there and let her run all over the place trying to figure out why he was so angry. Finally, he said something – and then something else, and then she started to understand. That night they'd made love – and it had been different. Passionate, yes, but also caring – an act to seal up a wound that had been opened.

When Shirley came over the next day she saw the mess of electronic parts scattered on her kitchen counter. “Toaster explode?” she joked, picking up something only three days before Lisa wouldn't have recognized.

“Just a hobby,” Lisa said, defensively, feeling as if Shirley had been picking through her bedside table, commenting on her method of birth control.

“Looks like something Mark would have put together – spit and bailing wire, couple of batteries and... viola, art. Too bad everyone else just saw it as some bailing wire and lots of spit.”

Mark hadn't called it art. He might have treated it that way, but he never called it that. “Yeah,” Lisa said, grabbing her purse, “but that's what he liked to do.” Then she said, not at all hungry, just to get her sister away, “let's get a bite, I'm starved.”

“You weren't together all that long, and it weren't even with him when he, you know, passed away.” At the door, she paused. “Cancer, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, cancer–”

“He didn't leave much behind did he? I think you were the only person who knew him well – and that's not saying a lot.”

“No,” she agreed, locking her front door, “not a lot at all.” ****

She decided to build two of them. That way she could have some practice and not put too much pressure on herself to get the one-and- only done perfectly. She burned herself, twice more – but then felt like she was really getting a handle on the iron. Her nose tickled for a long time from the resin-reek of the melting solder, but then she started to enjoy it – it was like an incense from some distant, mechanical land. Something burned in Mark's church.

It wasn't hate that had tensed him that day in the park around dear little – it was responsibility. “I was scared. Damn, I hate that – that feeling. Like walking on glass. They're so fragile, you know. I know what that was like, how one wrong thing... well, it might not mean anything to me, but to them it could be how they see the world after. That freaks me out. I'm not ready to do it right, I guess – I'm too selfish. When I want to do, I want to do it right, to be there all the time for them – to really be there for them, to help them. Now, though, the responsibility scares me.”

“You just have to let go,” she'd told him, holding him close and feeling his breathing, hot breathing on the side of her neck. “Other people have the same fears, but they manage okay. You just have to learn to let go. It's how we go on – it's how you leave a part of yourself behind. You're just scared because you only want to leave the best of you behind.”

He'd nodded, his heavy body moving slightly, too, as his head did. “I know. I just keep thinking that... maybe I'm not good enough.”

The first one Lisa built had faltered, as if stricken with a kind of electronic/mechanical palsy. She went back to the instruction sheet and spent a few minutes following it's strange course. There, finally she saw it, a stray wire, a hesitant short. After a quick, skillful jab with the soldering iron it seemed to work fine.

At dawn, which seemed appropriate, she took copies she'd made of the instructions, put them in the cigar tubes she'd bought, attached them to their backs, and let them go. The original moved across the alley, vanishing quickly off into the distance. Her first born started off to the right, slowly making its way among the trash cans and garage doors; the whine of its little electric motors went on for a long time, until fading into the general background of the city.

The second born went to the left, darting across the dark asphalt – but then stopped just about halfway. It stayed there for a minute, spinning slowly as it sought nutritious sunlight. Finally it stopped its dance and made its way slowly down the other side of the alley, until vanishing among some parked cars.

The tears were a surprise, there before she was even aware she was crying. She watched her descendants until she felt they were able to make it on their own, then she wished them well, gave them her love, and went back inside.

Thursday, March 13, 2014

So far you lucky readers -- if that’s really what you are -- have
been treated to lost nuclear hardware, misplaced biological weapons,
an18th century spiritualist and his clockwork ‘God,’ and recently,
creatures great and small (mostly small) that can kill you faster than
you can read this sentence -- even if you’re a slow reader.

But
there’s an even more terrifying, creepy, freaky, disturbing subject we
haven’t talked about yet: one that can make even the heartiest,
stone-stomached of you clutch your tail-wagging doggies and purring
kitties while rocking back and forth mumbling “nature is good, nature is
good, nature is good …”

As you’ll soon read, however,
even your loving pets can save you from the nightmare that is, more
than likely, with you already.

Or, to be precise, living inside you already: parasites.

YouTube
has far too many clips of botflies, tapeworms, or pinworms in all their
disgusting glory: squirming and writhing from puss-glistening holes in
their victims, squirming in the bellies of those unfortunate enough to
have become part of their life cycle. But that’s not the worst.

We
like to think we’re the masters of our destiny, that “I think I shall
do (fill in the blank)” comes only from our minds and wills. But in
some cases that’s just not true -- or, perhaps, that’s what the
creature living inside me is telling me to say.

Welcome to the wonderful world of not just parasites, but parasites that directly influence or flat-out control their hosts.

Beginning
big or at least not microscopic, the emerald cockroach wasp has a very
unique, and rather frightening, method of supplying its pupal young with
a meal. Like some other insects, the wasp feeds its young living prey:
paralyzing the snack and then laying an egg on its still-living body.
But the emerald isn’t a very big bug, unlike the monstrous tarantula
wasp, so it can’t drag its prey back to its burrow. Instead, the
emerald performs a type of on-the-go brain surgery, carefully stinging a
roach in a few selected parts of its brain, disabling its escape
reflex. The wasp then chews off the roach’s antenna, effectively
blinding it. Hijacking the roach’s remaining stub of an antenna, it
then leads the still-living and -- if roaches have a form of
consciousness -- aware bug back to its burrow where it will be a
still-living dinner for its offspring.

Yes, you may shudder. But it gets worse.

You’re
just lucky you’re not a snail, especially one that happens to become
part of a leucochloridium paradoxum ’s elaborate lifecycle. Beginning
as eggs in bird droppings, leucochloridium enters the snail’s body and
then proceeds into its digestive tract. After a bit of time there, it
develops into a larva – and then things get interesting.

How,
you might ask, does leucochloridium go from snails to birds? Well, we
know how -- but you might not want to know the answer.

What
leucochloridium does is make its way from the snail’s gut to one of its
eyestalks. There it causes the stalk to become red and inflamed. But
that’s not all. The parasite also distorts the snail’s light perception
so that it doesn’t hide from light anymore. So, out in the broad
daylight, one eyestalk brightly colored, it becomes a something very
much like a grub or caterpillar -- which birds love to eat. So the
whole cycle begins again.

Then there’s sacculina, a
type of barnacle. It loves crabs, but not in a healthy kind of way.
What sacculina does, while in the barnacle’s larval phase, is find a
nice, juicy crab and land on it. Then it walks around the unlucky
crustacean until it finds an unarmored joint, and injects itself into
the crab’s tasty meat. But sacculina doesn’t eat the crab. Oh, no –
it’s not as simple as that. After a time in the crab’s body, the
barnacle reproduces and reproduces and reproduces some more until it
emerges as something a lot like a female’s egg sac.

That’s
important, because it’s not just the female crab this happens to. If
you should happen to be a male crab then transvestitism is in your
future. Sacculina messes with the hormones in the male crab, making it
basically a female -- especially appealing to other male crabs. It even
goes as far as adjust the male’s behavior so it actually begins to act
like a female crab, all to attract a male crab that may or may not have
other sacculina parasites to fertilize and keep the cycle going. Once
sacculina has you, if you’re a crab that is, then you belong to it.
Sterilized, you become nothing but a mother to its eggs. Until you die.

We’re
not finished yet -- far from it. Just be lucky you’re not a
grasshopper or a cricket. Spinochordodes tellinii (the hairworm) larva
finds its way into an unlucky hoppity by being eaten. Once in the bug
it grows -- but don’t think the worm just gets bigger. It gets so big
that when the adult worm comes out of the cricket it can be four times
longer than the bug. It’s how it comes out that’s going to give you the
shivers. When it simply has had enough of the bug, having pretty much
eaten all of it from the inside, the worm takes possession of the
insect’s brain, causing it to single-mindedly hunt out water. When it
does, the bug jumps in -- and that’s when the worm erupts out of the
host and swims away.

Okay, so it’s not fun to be a
snail, or a crab, or a cricket. But what about poor homo sapiens?
Please don’t tell me you think we don’t have our own, completely
unwelcome passengers. I’ve already mentioned botflies, pinworms and
tapeworms. But they are just freeloaders. They aren’t driving the bus
that is us like these other manipulative parasites do.

Hold
that puppy close, cuddle that kitten -- but maybe not that close. Ever
heard of toxoplasma gondii? No? Well you might have but it’s
certainly heard of you. In fact I’ll bet dollars to donuts that it’s
paying a lot of attention to these words right now. Feel like doing
something else? Anything else but reading this?

Maybe that isn’t you. Maybe it’s toxoplasma gondii.

I
love kitties. But after reading about toxoplasma gondii I think I’m
going to become a dog person. Primarily a cat parasite, gondii’s a
protozoa that enters the feline system when the animal eats an infected
animal. Once in the system, the protozoa can then reproduce asexually,
making life pretty damned easy for itself.

But not for
its hosts. Although the protozoa is mostly a cat fancier, it also can
infect rats and mice. When it does, it does something rather creepy: it
directly screws with the infected animal’s brain, taking out Mickey’s
fear of cats. Think about that for a second: not open spaces, not
water, not something big and general. Gondii only takes out a mouse’s
fear of cats -- making sure it’ll get eaten by one, its host of
preference.

Like I said, I really like kitties. But is
that really ‘me’ who likes cats? Rats and mice and other warm-blooded
creatures can carry gondii. You and I and every other homo sapien are
also warm-blooded. I think you see where this is going.

Here’s
a number for you: 25%. That’s a rather benign amount until you think
of 25% of humans. Especially when I add that it’s been theorized that
25% of human beings may be infected by gondii – a parasite that affects
the behavior of its hosts.

Some researchers have
suggested that men who have gondii in their systems have lower IQs, are
more prone to ‘novelty seek,’ and more masculine. Weirdly, infected
women come out with higher IQs.

Then there’s
reproduction. Not only do some think gondii changes what we are
personality-wise, but its also been suggested that women who are
infected have a tendency to give birth to more sons -- and males are
more likely to spread the infection.

We’ve lost nuclear
weapons, contaminated whole islands with biological devices, created
mechanical Gods, and have been killed by very small critters with very
nasty venoms. But when you think about parasites, especially certain
kinds of parasites, the question then becomes:

Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Here's an extra-special sale and a great opportunity to read my non-erotic science fiction/fantasy/horror collection, Love Without Gun Control, and my non-fiction (strange history, weird art, etc) book, Welcome To Weirdsville for a great discount!

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when a woman gave birth to a new species … but not one of flesh and
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Peek under the rugs, open more than a few drawers, peek in the back
shelves and you'll find that ... well, Lord Byron himself said it best:
"Truth is always strange, stranger than fiction." Lakes that explode,
parasites that can literally change your mind, The New Motor, a noble
Word War 1 German pirate, the odd nature of ducks, the War Magician, the
City of Fire, men and their too big guns, a few misplaced nuclear
weapons, an iceberg aircraft carrier, the sad death of Big Mary, the
all-consuming hunger of the Bucklands, the giggling genius of Brian G.
Hughes, the Kashasha laughter epidemic.... Ponder that in a world that
holds things like kudzu, ophiocordyceps unilateralis, The Antikythera
Device, The Yellow Kid, Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, Alfred Jarry,
Joseph Pujol, and suicide-bombing ants ... who knows what other kinds of
wonders as well as horrors may be out there?

1854America, the Northeast. The time, particularly, is important. Think about it: 1854. - Years before even the civil war, a time of technological innovation. - No electric lights. - The safety match was even a year away. - No elevators. - The hypodermic syringe and spinal anesthesia was either just developed
(the former) or just a little ways away (the latter). So don’t even
THINK of getting sick. - Think coal, wool coats, the Crimean War, legal slavery, and Sir Richard Burton in Mecca and Medina.Also John Murray Spear. Go ahead, look him up. If you're lucky, you might find him as a
footnote, a side-thought in the spiritualist movement of the time. You
know: ghosts, table-turning, trances, automatic writing, levitations ...
in other words, spirits. Spear was part of that world, a medium-
temperature medium. Then sometime during that coal and Crimean
War year of 1854 Spear was elevated from mediocrity to the domain
of the truly, magnificently ... unusual.

Go
ahead, look him up. If you’re lucky, you might find him as a footnote, a
side-thought in the spiritualist movement of the time. You know:
ghosts, table-turning, trances, automatic writing, levitations ... in
other words, spirits. Spear was part of that world, a medium-temperature
medium.
Then sometime during that year of 1854 Spear was elevated from mediocrity to the domain of the truly, magnificently ... unusual.
Contacted by a bunch of spirits, with an “apparent mechanical turn of mind”
See in 1854 Spear was contacted by a bunch of spirits, with an “apparent
mechanical turn of mind” (to quote A.J. Davis) that included the ghost
of Benjamin Franklin: the Association of Electricizers, who commanded
him to go forth unto this world and build The New MotorRead more at http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2014/02/the-new-motor-or-steam-powered-messiah.html#upMoP3GGabdutXcP.99

Go
ahead, look him up. If you’re lucky, you might find him as a footnote, a
side-thought in the spiritualist movement of the time. You know:
ghosts, table-turning, trances, automatic writing, levitations ... in
other words, spirits. Spear was part of that world, a medium-temperature
medium.
Then sometime during that year of 1854 Spear was elevated from mediocrity to the domain of the truly, magnificently ... unusual.Read more at http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2014/02/the-new-motor-or-steam-powered-messiah.html#upMoP3GGabdutXcP.99

Go
ahead, look him up. If you’re lucky, you might find him as a footnote, a
side-thought in the spiritualist movement of the time. You know:
ghosts, table-turning, trances, automatic writing, levitations ... in
other words, spirits. Spear was part of that world, a medium-temperature
medium.
Then sometime during that year of 1854 Spear was elevated from mediocrity to the domain of the truly, magnificently ... unusual.Read more at http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2014/02/the-new-motor-or-steam-powered-messiah.html#upMoP3GGabdutXcP.99

Reel Monsters

Dark Doings at Miskatonic U

Welcome To Weirdsvlle

Love Without Gun Control

Calling M.Christian versatile is a
tremendous understatement. Extensively published in science fiction, fantasy,
horror, thrillers, and even non-fiction, it is in erotica that M.Christian has
become an acknowledged master, with stories in such anthologies as
Best American Erotica, Best Gay Erotica, Best Lesbian Erotica, Best Bisexual
Erotica, Best Fetish Erotica, and in fact too many anthologies, magazines, and
sites to name.In erotica,
M.Christian is known and respected not just for his passion on the page but
also his staggering imagination and chameleonic ability to successfully and
convincingly write for any and all orientations.

But M.Christian has other tricks up
his literary sleeve: in addition to writing, he is a prolific and respected
anthologist, having edited 25 anthologies to date including the Best S/M
Erotica series; Pirate Booty; My Love For All That Is Bizarre: Sherlock Holmes
Erotica; The Burning Pen; The Mammoth Book of Future Cops, and The Mammoth Book
of Tales of the Road (with Maxim Jakubowksi); Confessions, Garden of Perverse,
and Amazons (with Sage Vivant), and many more.

M.Christian's short fiction has been
collected into many bestselling books in a wide variety of genres, including
the Lambda Award finalist Dirty Words and other queer collections like Filthy
Boys, BodyWork, and his best-of-his-best gay erotica book, Stroke the
Fire.He also has collections of
non-fiction (Welcome to Weirdsville, Pornotopia, and How To Write And Sell
Erotica); science fiction, fantasy and horror (Love Without Gun Control); and
erotic science fiction including Rude Mechanicals, Technorotica, Better Than
The Real Thing, and the acclaimed Bachelor Machine.

As a novelist, M.Christian has shown
his monumental versatility with books such as the queer vamp novels Running Dry
and The Very Bloody Marys; the erotic romance Brushes; the science fiction
erotic novel Painted Doll; and the rather controversial gay horror/thrillers
Finger's Breadth and Me2.

M.Christian is also the Associate
Publisher for Renaissance eBooks,
where he strives to be the publisher he'd want to have as a writer, and to help
bring quality books (erotica, noir, science fiction, and more) and authors out
into the world.